1991 Gulf War, after the No-Fly-Zones, after all the pressure London had
absorbed in backing US policy through the 1990s, and after 9/11 itself,
that Britain could have let the US go it alone in 2002. For Tony Blair it was
barely a decision to make. He had set out his stall in 1997 on the assumption that he was able to run an Atlanticist and a European policy in
genuine synergy; without having to make a strategic choice between
them. But 9/11 and the war on terror – unluckily for him – forced Blair to
make a choice. There was no question how he would jump when it was
finally forced on him. It was simple positioning. And it offered him a
tempting personal diplomatic opportunity of global importance.
Could he have stopped the war by refusing Washington his support?
Opinion remains sharply divided.51 The key point, however, is that while
he may have hoped he could achieve some sort of success without a war,
he was never motivated by a desire to stop the Bush Administration from
acting altogether. He too wanted to escape from the stalemate that the
Iraq policy had become. More telling is the charge that Blair’s positioning
actually made US policy drift under Bush worse than it might otherwise
have been. Zbigniew Brzezinski and former members of the Bush team
credit Tony Blair with giving a finesse and persuasive power to policies
that did not deserve it; helping to shield the President in some key
moments from domestic and international criticism that was his due.52
Whether this is an over-estimate, there is no doubt that Blair’s personal
commitment to the Bush Administration cost Britain dearly, at least in
the short term. Its position on a number of arms control issues changed
to accommodate US shifts, and the reluctance of the Prime Minister to air
any disagreements with Bush in public contributed to a growing image of
‘poodleism’ which considerably diminished domestic support in Britain
for foreign operations. In April 2007 a YouGov survey indicated a sceptical low point in the public’s appetite for any more foreign involvements.53
51 On the view that he could, see, Ted Widmer, ‘A Legacy That Is Very Mixed, Even in
America’, Financial Times, 11 May 2007, p. 15. On the view that he could not, see Strobe
Talbot, quoted in Edward Luce, ‘Articulate Premier Who Gave Tongue-tied President an
Easier Ride’, Financial Times, 11 May 2007, p. 3.
52 Ibid.
53 YouGov Poll, 26–28 March 2007, reported in The Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2007, p. 16.
In the Middle East Tony Blair was forced to suppress some understandable exasperation at the failure of the ‘road map’ for an
Israel/Palestinian settlement to gain any momentum. He had staked a
good deal of personal capital on pushing the vision of a new start in
regional relations within and between the key players. There was a
modicum of success with the announcement in December 2003 that
Libya would give up its nuclear programme. That was a step in the right
direction for a new deal. But it paled beside the growing instabilities
across the region and the continuing failure to gain any diplomatic purchase on nuclear proliferation, or any other matters, with Iran. Britain’s
own position in the region had been fatally undermined by Iraq and there
was little it could do but fall back into reactive mode. The short Lebanon
war in summer 2006 left the government under international pressure
for, in effect, supporting an Israeli folly against Hizbollah in Lebanon and
a US policy that made it worse. A Downing Street insider described those
weeks as the ‘lowest point’ in Britain’s Middle East odyssey. It was another
short-term cost of long-term positioning.
European relations needed the impetus of new leadership, which it had
by 2007 as Blair left Downing Street. This was not only provided by Paris
and Berlin. The Bush Administration had made copious efforts to repair
some of the damage after 2003. It had not reversed any of its fundamental
positions and Bush himself was so damaged that it hardly mattered. But
officials and technocrats on both sides of the Atlantic worked hard to
reconnect on policy details and provided some of the diplomatic infrastructure for a new start. In this there was some evidence of a new realism
on both sides that the transatlantic relationship would never be the same
again.54 Tony Blair was marginal to this process. His failure to achieve
membership of the Eurozone and the collapse of the constitutional treaty
only weakened his ability to be an initiator. The grand project that would
again raise European politics out of the realm of the institutional – and
the constitutional – to make an independent impact on world politics
would have to be driven by a new generation of leaders. Outside Iraq and
Afghanistan, there was little he could tilt at that engaged most of the
Europeans directly. The investment that Tony Blair had made in
President Putin was dwarfed by Russia’s deteriorating relations with the
US and Britain had little scope to do anything more than react to the progressive chill.
54 Daniel Dombey, ‘Transatlantic Climate Shift’, Financial Times, 4 June 2007, Supplement,
p. 2.
The legacy
The empirical balance of the scorecard is only part of an assessment.
Intentions also matter and Tony Blair argued strongly after 2003 that
his intentions, throughout the decade, ought to have been better
understood. He bequeathed to foreign policy a deep commitment
that globalisation had to be embraced, politically, economically and
morally. It followed that a narrow view of national interests was selfdefeating. It also followed that his much vaunted, but little analysed,
‘values’ in world politics represented a genuine innovation compared
with previous approaches. In a world where power is so disbursed, and
where individuals and dynamic social organisations are so empowered,
where the very nature of the state is changing, only a consensus on
values can create the mechanisms for meaningful political action.55 If
prevailing Western values are under challenge they may simply lose
their power to mobilise people. Promoting them is therefore not an act
of idealism but a hard-nosed investment in political survival. This constituted a claim to internationalism that retains considerable resonance, though how it is enacted from era to era will naturally vary, and
opinions continue to differ over how vulnerable our values presently
are to challenge.
Like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair also succeeded in putting some global
political issues – Africa, development, climate change – on the contemporary agenda. He contributed a determination to try to translate global
aspirations into practical policy initiatives. He probably under-estimated
the power of international constraints on action and over-estimated his
own power to persuade. He was constantly frustrated that the breakneck
pace of review and action in the first term could not be maintained thereafter. Nevertheless, a determination to try to unite the genuinely aspirational with the politically practical is an honourable legacy. Inde
ed some
of the ‘spin and hype’ that surrounded all Tony Blair’s initiatives was
partly driven by a desire to create momentum, to build and direct a consensus, using all means possible.
The underlying question of Blair’s legacy was something he raised
himself in his final months as Prime Minister. Having, as he felt, set the
aspirational course for the twenty-first century, he posed the question
that Britain, as a society, has to decide whether it is prepared to take on
55 See, Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and
Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002).
the task; rise to the challenge.56 The Western world, he had decided, is
divided into those states that are able and prepared to take the initiative
and act on behalf of freedom, tolerance and democracy, and those who
are not. In a sense it is the old distinction between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ of security, but in this case on a much wider, foreign policy stage
of the twenty-first century. To critics, such a stance seemed to be tantamount to asking whether, as he departed, the nation was really worthy of
him. To supporters, it was merely an honest assessment of the choices all
European states now face. Few Prime Ministers would have expressed the
matter so clearly or with such conviction.
56 Oral Evidence to the House of Commons Liaison Committee, 6 February 2007. Blair, ‘Our
Nation’s Future’.
28
Defence
Speaking in Plymouth in January 2007, Tony Blair argued that there were
two types of nations among Britain’s allies: ‘Those who do war-fighting
and peacekeeping and those who have, effectively, except in the most
exceptional circumstances, retreated to the peacekeeping alone.’1 The
sharpness of the distinction drawn here, in addition to the description of
abandoning a war-fighting role as a ‘retreat’, is revealing. When Blair had
become Prime Minister almost a decade earlier the distinction would
have followed American lines, with war-fighting about great power confrontations involving the full range of military capabilities. Everything
else, including peacekeeping, came into the lesser category of ‘operations
other than war’ – possibly altruistic in motive, invariably limited in scope
and rarely an appropriate use of proper war-fighting forces. During the
1990s this sharp distinction became questionable. The peacekeeping category became stretched in the post-Cold War world. From the original
concept of policing cease-fire lines, with the consent of the belligerents
and using minimum force, it expanded into helping conflicts wind down
and, more difficult still, acting on behalf of civilians caught up in vicious
civil wars, by which point peacekeepers were in effect taking sides. By
then these missions were hazardous, albeit on a small scale, and hard to
distinguish at a tactical level from war-fighting. The language tried to
keep up, as they came to be described as an extension or variation of the
traditional peacekeeping model – a ‘third-generation’ or ‘wider’ type, or
about ‘peace support’ or ‘peace enforcement’.
By the time Labour came to office, prompted by the activity surrounding the implosion of Yugoslavia, the talk was increasingly of
‘humanitarian interventions’, which contained elements of both warfighting and peacekeeping. The new Labour government had embraced
11 Rt Hon. Tony Blair, ‘Our Nation’s Future – Defence’, Speech on board HMS Albion,
Plymouth, 17 January 2007, www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10735.asp.
this development more enthusiastically than its Conservative predecessor. The frequency with which Blair sent Britain’s armed forces into
battle became one of the defining features of his premiership. The first
set of interventions with which he was associated – air strikes against
Iraq in 1998, the campaign over Kosovo in 1999 and the intervention
in Sierra Leone in 2000 were not without critics but gained considerable domestic and international support. The two of the 2000s –
Afghanistan and Iraq – were far more controversial, and Iraq in particular cast a large cloud. They were justified using the more altruistic
rationales developed during the 1990s – to fight against repression,
promote democracy and support economic reconstruction – but a
national security purpose was also acquired–to eliminate terrorist bases
and weapons of mass destruction. As a result the question of when it is
right and proper to resort to armed force dominated debate about
foreign policy. Blair was always happy to contribute, even more so when
the criticisms reached a crescendo as the situation in Iraq turned out so
badly.
This was the purpose of the Plymouth speech. As was so often the case
Blair’s argument depended on his conviction that Britain was a country
that could combine opposites and reconcile the contradictory. Rather
than pose values against interests, he argued that it was ‘by furthering our
values that we further our interests in the modern era of globalisation and
interdependence’. Nor was there any need to choose between America
and Europe as alternative allies, or even between different types of power.
Uniquely, he insisted, Britain could bring ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power together,
using armed force where necessary while at the same time acting to the
fore in addressing the big questions of poverty and climate change. And
when it used hard power this required seeing the purpose of both warfighting and peacekeeping. After the bruising experience of the previous
few years of combat, Blair was arguing against a retreat away from warfighting as if this would be tantamount to a retreat from Britain’s world
role.
This was at heart a debate about this role and, as Blair would have it,
about whether Britain should be activist and internationalist or passive
and insular. The larger questions of foreign policy and the diplomatic
origins of the various interventions that reflected this policy are dealt
with elsewhere in this book. My focus is on how Blair’s ambitious views
on the contemporary value of a war-fighting capability developed and, as
a result of their vigorous application, whether such missions will be
embraced so readily in the future.
The legacy
Defence for Labour prior to Blair had been an electoral disaster zone.
Historically, ‘Labour’s stance on security issues’ had been ‘much less
assured than the Conservatives’.2 As a result of its preoccupation with
grandiose schemes for disarmament and an apparent squeamishness
when it came to applying force, it was regularly castigated as naïve, bordering on unpatriotic, and far too ready to discount external threats.
During the Thatcher decade of the1980s, caught out by the successful
prosecution of a popular war over the Falkland Islands in 1982, and then
by deep divisions over nuclear policy, defence had become a key vulnerability. By the s
tart of the 1990s the Labour leadership had begun to reposition the party as pro-military and the nuclear issue had already lost its
salience as a result of the end of the Cold War. During John Major’s
administration, the Vanguard- class submarines with their US Trident
D-5 missiles, entered service, but short-range systems were abandoned.
Labour sought to keep the focus on domestic issues, and in particular
the economy and the future of the welfare state, where the Major government was seen to be most vulnerable. Under Blair this continued. The
brief of the Shadow Defence Secretary, David Clark, was assumed to be to
keep defence as low a profile issue as possible, and avoid attracting any
fire. In this he succeeded.
The 1997 manifesto promised retention of Trident and strength in
‘defence through NATO’. It mentioned the new threats of proliferating
‘weapons of mass destruction, the growth of ethnic nationalism and
extremism, international terrorism, and crime and drug trafficking’.
After paying tribute to the ‘professionalism and courage’ of the armed
forces, it promised to ‘conduct a strategic defence and security review to
reassess our essential security interests and defence needs’.3 Demanding a
defence review was an alternative to developing clear and unequivocal
policies, avoiding controversial stances while hinting at something
radical to come. Yet even talk of a defence review carried dangers, for it
implied cuts. During the 1970s, as the economy deteriorated, Labour had
constantly raided the defence budget for expenditure savings. In the 1997
manifesto Labour promised that this time the review would be ‘foreign
policy led’. The lack of a Treasury role was greeted with considerable
scepticism. Labour was still associated with expansionary plans for the
2 Dan Keohane, Security in British Politics, 1945– 99, (London: Macmillan, 2000).
3 New Labour because Britain Deserves Better, Labour Party manifesto, May 1997.
welfare state, and in this context it was questioned whether the Treasury
could help itself.
Yet there was no particular budgetary reason for a defence review in
May 1997. The peace dividend following the end of the Cold War had
been taken; there was not much fat left to cut; many of the organisational
BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007 Page 97